Student success in higher education generally means obtaining a degree, but students can take multiple routes to reach that goal. While College Possible has traditionally focused on supporting learners as they persist and graduate from the school where they enrolled, in 2022, we agreed to help a small college in crisis blaze a new trail for its students. This remarkable — and ultimately successful — partnership with College Possible’s Catalyze student success programming proved fruitful for the college’s departing students, and it yielded lessons that College Possible can apply to future partnerships.
Founded in 2016, Catalyze is the largest postsecondary program within the College Possible ecosystem. Launched with 65 students in that first year, Catalyze now has 42 student success coaches embedded in 12 partner institutions serving 5,700 students nationwide. These near-peer coaches, recent college graduates who are serving a year of AmeriCorps service, are deploying a proven, evidence-based curriculum to help students from underrepresented communities navigate the college landscape and surmount common barriers so they can persist and earn their degrees.
College Possible typically partners with regional public universities with large numbers of Pell Grant-eligible students and significant student learning and graduation gaps. But the organization received an unusual request in December 2022: Presentation College, a private four-year institution in remote Aberdeen, South Dakota, was closing the following year. They asked College Possible to support its 408 remaining students as they graduated or transferred.
Supported by funding from SeaChange Capital Partners, which assists nonprofits working through complex organizational changes, we moved quickly to launch our Catalyze program on Presentation’s campus. The Catalyze team hired two former Catalyze coaches who had the knowledge and experience to begin building relationships immediately. Additionally, data systems and dashboards were quickly built to track student responses and progress on their transition checklists.
To get the word out about the new program on campus, we worked closely with admissions counselors (who were reorganized into transition counselors), deans who supervised academic divisions and student services, and sports team coaches (because 54 percent of Presentation College students played varsity athletics). To further raise awareness, the college and College Possible co-branded all materials about the transition. As Presentation College arranged 36 separate teach-out agreements, we built trust among the student body by making ourselves visible on campus. The Catalyze team set up tables in the student union, hosted coffee hours in the cafe, attended basketball games, did brief in-class presentations and entered students’ names into raffles if they agreed to meet with a coach and discuss their transition plans.
“It took a little while for us to gain momentum. Faculty and staff were looking for new jobs, while students at that point were still in that state of grief where they were paralyzed,” Catherine Marciano, vice president of partnerships at College Possible, told The Hechinger Report in 2024. But given time, she said, “We saw those emotions shift to, ‘OK, I have to figure out my next steps. I want to keep playing sports or keep pursuing my nursing degree.’”
The odds were stacked against Presentation College and College Possible. A 2022 report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) found that fewer than half (47.1 percent) of students re-enroll at another institution after a college closure. But 78 percent of Presentation students responded to outreach from a College Possible coach — and 88 percent of students served by College Possible during the spring 2023 semester either graduated or transferred to another institution in the fall.
“We took on the project as a leap of faith with a do-no-harm attitude,” Marciano said. “We never imagined that our results would be as good as they were.”
댓글